Going sort of gently into the evening

These days I make yoghurt. There is nothing demanding about it. It is the opposite of what I used to do when I wrote about extreme cooking challenges for Caribbean Beat in the early 2000s. Yoghurt-making is a quiet, easy time-filler that happens to produce something edible. I could ask for little more.

But that is not the beginning of the story. Yoghurt and I did not meet on friendly terms. It was more a matter of pitting my low threshold for things I don’t like against my determination to try everything once. And if I’m in, I’m all in.

There would be no mass-produced, super-sweetened, fun-flavoured brands for me. When I started, I started with the Mt St Benedict, monk-made, plain-or-vanilla variety.

I tried a few other hardcore yoghurts, but it’s God’s own yoghurt that is ambrosia. Tragedy strikes often. The brand has to be chased around the country, begged for, hoarded. They just don’t make enough. That’s why I decided I had to make my own.

I’m not quite at the point of going gently or otherwise into that good night. At least that is what everyone conspires to have me think. So I’m not describing my relationship with the yoghurting process as something your neighbourhood crone has as part of her routine. But I’d at least like to think of this as the evening of my life. It feels like evening. Things are getting quieter in my head and in my world. Apart from general anxiety about the state of the country and a Musk/Trump-led world. Setting aside a lifelong worry about everything to do with all my friends and near relations. Trying not to think about if and in what form retirement will come for me in a decade or two.

Those things aside, I like the softness of now. I don’t especially miss the galloping days of Friday-night limes and never-ending conversations about weekend plans. There is a calm joy in finding myself padded by an abundance of cats, book in hand, looking at the sky change colour. (With the hours I keep, this can happen in the pm change or the am change.)

Recently, I ran into my younger self at a coffee shop. I saw people I’d not seen in ages. People I associate with hostile lighting and deafening music. People I remember from a time when things – all sorts of things, but most of all things that could change your life for the night or forever – could happen. Now we were at the Croisee of caffeine-and-back-to-work. And it was two in the afternoon. It was both sobering and sober.

How-are-you, is-your-mother-well, and that’s us all caught up. It’s amazing how, with enough time and history our exchanges are so succinct.

In the evening of your life, you start to turn the volume down. Except maybe during Carnival. Now, instead of wishing I was part of whatever my old friends were doing, I go home to my yoghurt. The person who used to retch at the sight of yoghurt is filling her kitchen with milk, giant bowls, more bowls, cheese cloth, strainers and jars.

It’s not as satisfying as making butter, because I know lots of other people can do it. I remember writing about making butter. That is a young woman’s work. Now that I am past my prime, my tasks are simpler.

Buy milk. Acquire starter. Boil milk, add starter. Wait. Refrigerate. Now I’m offering starter yoghurt to everyone I know. A friend told me if this writing thing doesn’t work out I should go into business. Even that makes me feel old, because I didn’t know I still had a choice about “this writing thing.” This is ridiculous – now I don’t even know a joke when I hear it?

I feel like my mother. Late at night, already dressed for bed, I roll into the kitchen and boil a cauldron of milk. I take the cat food out of the oven and store it in the dryer because that’s the only place the cats can’t reach it. I need the oven for the milk to set overnight. Then it’s on its own.

Because the universe never misses a beat when it comes to making sure I know my place, on my way to bed I find the Cats’ Father listening to Pink Pony Club by the 13-year-old-looking Chappell Roan. Am I really ready for the onset of the evening?